entangledbank

Entangled Bank takes its name from the first sentence of the final paragraph of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859):

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

 

Rachel Mason Dentinger is a muddy-boots historian of science and science writer.  She completed her Ph.D. in the history of science at the University of Minnesota in December 2009.  Her dissertation is entitled, “The Nature of Defense: Coevolutionary Studies, Ecological Interaction, and the Evolution of ‘Natural Insecticides,’ 1959-1983.”

Rachel lives in London with her husband Bryn and their son Oban.  She is a research fellow at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London, working on “One Medicine? Investigating Human and Animal Disease,” a project funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Rachel has written for Kew Magazine and The Naked Scientists.  Recently, she won the Garden Media Guild New Talent Award for some of her Kew Magazine pieces, including “Seeing the Wood for the Trees,” “Underground Connections,” and “The Allure of Dracula.”

For this award, the judges wrote, “Rachel stood out for her ability to make scientific content accessible to all, skilfully weaving botanical terminology, enlightening interviews and a wonderful sense of place into her pieces – never dumbing down, and always educating upwards.”

 

For more on the awards ceremony, check out the Kew Magazine blog.

A version of “Seeing the Word for the Trees” has just been reprinted as “Smart Phones, Smart Maps” (scroll down the page to find it) in Geographical, the magazine of the Royal Geographical Society.

 

 

See Rachel’s CV.

rmdentingerATimperialDOTacDOTuk